Fuck, never looked at it from that angle but you’re not wrong. This makes me super sad.
Lots of parallels here with the death of the traditional CRPG - popular for a while, and then action RPGs, MMORPGs, and thinly-veiled shooters swept into that space when technology and market trends started to allow for them. Much harder to sell an Icewind Dale when it has to compete with a Diablo II, a World of WarCraft, or (further forward) a Mass Effect or Fallout 3.
This.
Luckily the hobby isnt quite dead yet. Like the space sim, flight sims live a full and meaningful life in the sidestreets away from the bang and glitz of the strip where the big shooters and muhmorpergers vie for the billions.
In fact, for a born-again rivet counter like me, now is the best time ever for flying.
Yes that’s from a game
The all time game that pains my soul that it has died is Subspace/Continuum. I guess it was inevitable, but it carried on for a while! At some point around 2013/2014 or something I realized the game was going to do nothing but die a slow death, so I finally quit, only playing some duels with long time friends occasionally.
I’m not an expert on the history of Subspace, though i did play for quite a while, since something like 97 or 98. It had decent playercounts so I’m not sure what happened. I do know that people were able to get onto the official servers with pirated copies of the game.
The reason that the death of this game causes me so much pain is that I literally cannot find another game to replace it. The movement is very deep - inertial asteroids style movement in which you can backthrust as well as forward thrust is very deep and subtle and while insanely difficult for a beginner to pick up, leads to very subtle gameplay.
The second game that pains me that it died is VIDEOBALL. On release it had about 60 people playing, but they bounced hard and fast. Imo there were multiple reasons it didn’t take off, but I still wish I was living in the plausibly alternate universe in which it did.
First, and foremost, the networking code is a mess. Even if you’re playing people on the same continent, you will have a massive advantage if you are hosting the game, but if you’re not hosting the game your shots will come out with a delay and it will be very difficult to aim and control the balls. This is the reason why I personally quit online play for quite a long time.
Secondly, it may be that a game like VIDEOBALL just doesn’t appeal to people anymore. Which is a real shame, because when I was a kid we would have LOVED VIDEOBALL.
Third, according to Tim Rogers they didn’t have much of a marketing budget. I did see the game get mentioned at gaming sites like Rock Paper Shotgun/etc. though.
On the bright side, I still hang out on a VIDEOBALL discord and play occasionally, so it’s not completely dead =)
The original Tribes. Best multiplayer game ever made. Amazing depth to the learning curve/skill of the game. I put thousands of hours into this, played in international matches, and loved every single second of it. I drifted away from the game because I got distracted with games like Everquest and Asherons call.
I wish someone would do a re-skin of this with modern graphics, and change absolutely nothing else. This would be an E-sports goldmine if done right. Watching matches is almost as much fun as playing them. If I had a billion dollars, I would throw all of it at this game and turn it into an e-sports powerhouse.
Still the most skill based shooter that’s ever been, as your projectiles have velocity based on your current movement, and you had a limited jetpack.
My impression from discussing AE with Vic a few times is that there were a few issues with the title beyond just implementing it. Agree about it being a great pity that a sequel didn’t get made, but I don’t think it was only because he didn’t have time/energy to learn a new platform.
That aside, I think it’s not the easiest game in the world to “remake”. It’s a tight design, so adding/subtracting stuff is not easy without breaking what makes the game work. And you pretty much have to do so, because issues that were ignored when the game was made, are no longer “acceptable” in new games. It’s a big and complex enough game that doing it solo represents a significant and difficult effort, but - despite its cult status - probably unlikely to sell big enough numbers to make it profitable for a bigger team.
I would love to try my hand personally at a remake some day, but I’m not sure it’s really possible to hit that particular sweet spot that Vic hit with the same design again (though for me, time is always the limiting factor - if I had enough time, or enough money to take the time, I’d probably go for it). I think the same may be true of a lot of the other classic game designs that would seem perfect for a small indie team such as Darklands and Warlords.
Is Falcon 4 still being tended to by the mod community?
yes it is.
Well, I wouldn’t dare to try to remake AE. I mentioned I would be willing, perhaps, to make a new engine (that’s easier to work with, and more attuned to current times/computers), and then let Vic work his magic (if he wanted to, of course).
And while I also doubt Vic gave up on his games solely because of engine issues, he admitted it was indeed a factor - so giving him a new engine that’s easier to work with would solve one of the issues that caused him to stop working on games. Now, maybe that wouldn’t be enough to get him back, and that’s OK. I just think it might be worth a shot if there is a slight chance of helping to get him back to games. ;)
I recommend downloading Subspace Continuum on Steam and messing around with it for at least an hour or two. Same gameplay, same maps, and at least for me, same terrible kill/death ratio. Also, one of the developers posts here, our own Rod Humble!
I was playing on the Chaos map and one of the other players messaged me, as I was a newcomer. He asked if I needed any help with the game and welcomed me. I told him that I liked playing it back in the day. He asked if I remembered a player with a certain username. “Yes,” I answered, “that name does ring a bell. Was that the nickname you used back then?” No, he said. That was his father. I felt old.
Can I include my favorite games/game series that never got a sequel?
Sierra’s Manhunter was probably doomed because it used a graphics engine one generation older than that used for the company’s flagship titles. But I loved the sci-fi/horror combo in the first 2 titles and had hoped for tgec3rd which I think was supposed to have been set in London.
SSI’s Roadwar series remains my favorite computer interpretation of a Car Wars/Mad Max world. Roadwar 2000 is one of my favorite games of all time. I liked Europa, the follow-up, and would have loved far more entries.
Dynamix/Sierra’s The Adventures of Willy Beamish was released near the beginning of the end of classic adventures, but I thought it was an amazing game that was deserving of a sequel or three.
Outwars by Singletrac Studios. I think it came out around 1998.
I only ever played SP, but I got totally lost in that game. I loved the surreal world. It defaulted to third person, but I played exclusively in first person. It was the first game I played that had a jetpack, and I loved the way they had it set up so that you could only use the jetpack in limited bursts, with automatic recharging between bursts, requiring a good amount of practice and skill to get the most out of it. I was enthralled with that aspect, and the way the levels were designed to make use of it. I’ve never since used a jetpack in a game that felt that good.
[Nostalgia derail] Anyway, I was so enamored of that game that I wrote an actual snail mail fan letter to the developer asking if a sequel was in the works.
About two weeks later, I received a very gracious snail mail letter in response, thanking me for my lengthy comments, and also telling me that a sequel was highly unlikely, and there was a reason, but I can’t remember what it was, and can’t find the letter now, though I know I kept it.
I usually keep all of my developer responses to my fan mail in the box with the games, but I apparently didn’t that time. :(
For instance, I’ve still got Derek Smart’s very nice response to the fan letter I wrote him in regard to Battlecruiser Millennium dated July 18, 2002 sitting right here in its retail box.
Another cherished possession is my Doom music CD autographed by Bobby Prince.
I miss those days. :) [/ Nostalgia derail]
Oh man, loved the Roadwar games, played them on my old Amiga. Would love to know of any similar newer game.
Hi @Left_Empty (and thanks to @Brooski for pinging me on this thread). Sorry you didn’t get a chance to play Star Chamber. Star Chamber didn’t technically get cancelled, it just didn’t make enough money to continue development (or even maintenance by SOE, after a few years of non-development). As an online CCG, it had a good run with 5 expansion packs.
While I’m proud of Star Chamber, I did make plenty of mistakes with it. I’ll just list two of the big ones here:
- No good single-player mode. Star Chamber was a pretty deep game, with a lot of room for player mastery. Not having a great single-player mode where players could safely stretch their newbie muscles to learn the basics (and then some of the subleties) of the game forced players into PvP situations too quickly.
- Too low variance / too high skill gaps. This point may be controversial, because the players who loved Star Chamber the most might claim that this made the game what they loved, but I think this is a point that novice (PvP) game designers should really take to heart. Star Chamber as a game was just too skill-intensive with not enough variance for lesser-skilled players to pull out enough victories against superior players. Not having enough variance in the game to keep games close and interesting causes those lesser-skilled players to drop out. I use words like “enough” because as a shuffled deck game, there was some variance. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough, because there were so many invariant mechanics (most notably, spending resources to build ships and citizens and then moving those fleets around the board) that skilled players could use to get edges, and all those incremental edges stacked up so much that even if the lesser-skilled player had a perfect draw, they’d often lose because they made minor mistakes in their resource allocations or movement.
I could go on and on about the mistakes I made. Star Chamber was my first shipped game, and I’ve learned a lot from it and afterward about game design. My latest card game projects – Eternal, Elder Scrolls Legends – both came with good solo play options for new players, more gameplay variance, and much less non-cardplay minutiae where lesser players lose percentage points. Clank! was a continuation of my love for mixing cards with board presence/movement, but both of those elements are much more streamlined so that it is a family friendly game. The skilled player is more likely to win, but everybody has a shot and there’s a few exciting “mini stories” to go around, regardless of who wins.
Sorry for the belated reply to the 2017 posts. I often read QT3 without logging in.
I worked at Sierra during Tribes 2, and then I was the primary PR guy for Tribes: Vengeance. Our hard-core community was amazing, and internally there was a great team of people who were very committed to the game.
I wonder if you could do a Battle Royale game with Tribes-like physics and weapons now.
Oh easily. All you would really need to do, would be to reskin the original tribes. Nothing has ever matched the feel of that game…the movement, the weight of it, the speed of it, the skiing…everything about it was just right. If you could get the game to feel the same way, with modern graphics, and pushed it as an E-sport, it would be huge. It’s a fantastic game to spectate, as well as play.
I’ve always been convinced Tribes was just too early for its own good. I saw E-sports coming back in the 90s, and have always believed that Tribes was the best possible game for it.
We’re in agreement there. Tribes came along before online gaming was ubiquitous (this was 2000-2001-ish when people were still dialing in with 56k modems via AOL!), and it was one of only a very few games that was basically online play required. We tried to counter that by working with Irrational to create a real offline story for Tribes: Vengeance, but at that point Sierra just didn’t have the money or ability really to compete with the big players.
Well the online, competitive aspect of it was what made the game in the first place. It’s possible to make a single player version of it that would be compelling probably, but the real fun of the game to me was the competition. I mean it really was a better and more fun version of something like Overwatch.
I still watch old Youtube vids of Natural capping flags lol.